It had taken her a long time to get here, longer than she would have been willing to endure under any other circumstances. The time it had taken had been fairly rapid by mortal standards, but not to her. She had railed against each and every delay. The time in one of the mortal vehicles, the ferry across the channel, slipping through the border, more of those four-wheeled motors. She had wanted to scream in frustration every time a new obstacle arose and she was forced to change her plans.
Once, oh-so-long-ago, she would have been able to make this journey in the space of a few modern minutes. It would have been so easy, so simple, but such options no longer were available to her, not now. In time that might change, especially if her hopes played out as she thought they would, but that was a matter for the future. For now, all she could do was trust in her arts to lead her in the correct direction, even as she strove to smother any hint of her own power.
The agent of Heaven had been swift and powerful, but she had also been young, oh so very inexperienced. Even with their light blazing brightly enough to burn away any hint of their passage they had left a trail that could be followed if one knew how to find it.
Mortal magic would have been hard-pressed to detect it, even gods would have struggled. It was a question of knowing what to look for, not raw power. True, a deity of the hunt or a deity of magic would have been able to brute-force such a detection, but for those without such specialized powers, the trail would have been invisible. The only reason she could follow it was due to her carefully amassed knowledge.
She felt an all too familiar surge of frustration at that thought. Once she wouldn’t have had to worry about knowledge and secrets. Once she would have been strong enough to rely on nothing but her own power.
Taking a deep breath she let the emotion go. It didn’t matter, her strength was meaningless if she couldn’t use it, her power all but worthless when she had to hide it. Oh, she could use both in subtle manners, but she could not afford to draw the attention that she might if she were to use both without care.
Her thoughts came to an end as the small vehicle she was in pulled over to the side of the road and then came to a stop.
“We’re here, Miss. That’ll be eighty-eight francs.”
With a sigh, she dug into her jacket and pulled out her beaten old wallet. She could afford to pay for her transport, but this would be the majority of her remaining funds. Well, with any luck she wouldn’t be needing to concern herself with money in the near future. Counting out the bills she handed them over to the middle-aged man that had been driving the vehicle. He took them, counted them himself, and then nodded to her. She idly remembered a time when she would happily have flayed the living flesh from his bones for daring to imply that her count could have been wrong. Funny how things changed.
Shortly thereafter she was standing at the side of the road watching as the mortal transport drove off in a cloud of dust. It was an interesting thing that the humans had created, she mused, a vehicle propelled by harnessing fire into motion. The last time she had been active in the mortal world had been more than two hundred years ago. Back then mortals had considered riding in pretty carts pulled by beasts to be the height of sophistication. This new ingenuity of theirs was . . . interesting, almost inspirational. Mentally she began to design a vehicle of her own, one powered by the etheric forces of the world rather than by the burning of ancient oils. Yes, it would not be difficult, not when compared to some of her previous works, so she could-
She shook her head, trying her best to chase such thoughts away. She had neither the time nor the resources to consider such a project at this time. In the future . . . maybe, depending on how things transpired in the next few weeks. But for now, patience would have to be exercised.
She heaved another sigh as she shouldered her bag and turned to stare at the simple dirt road that led away into the fields. As she did so she hitched up her hood so it covered more of her face, casting it into shadows despite the sun beating down upon her. Life just hadn’t been easy, not for the last two millennia. Well, she had known that this would not be a simple path to walk when she had set out upon it, but then again if it had been then it wouldn’t have been worth it. He had convinced her that this wasn’t just some mad dream, that this was something that could actually happen. All these centuries she had put her faith in him being right about this, just as he’d been right about so much else.
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As she took her first steps down the road, she couldn’t help but notice the state of the clothing she wore and let out a bark of laughter.
Here she was, clad in clothing that was only a step away from being the sort of garb worn by the beggars of this era, and she was doing it of her own choice. She, who had once possessed silks and leathers of the finest design, who had slept in palaces and owned such treasures as to make the wealthiest emperor weep with envy. The irony was deliciously bitter.
Banishing such thoughts from her mind she focused on her goal. The farmstead where the agent was keeping her target was about a couple of hours' walk away, maybe longer. Walking was the only option available to her at the moment, and she could not afford to go faster than a mortal would have done. Any overt uses of her power were simply too risky this close to her goal, so walking it was. It was alright though; she wasn’t in too much of a hurry. Despite the mortal methods she had been forced to use she had made decent time, at this moment the sun was still high in the sky, and that left her plenty of time to reach the farmstead before darkness fell.
She knew that the ritual the agent would be using to awaken Adam’s blood would most likely be tonight; she just didn’t know what kind of ritual it would be. The moon was to be full tonight, and if what she remembered of the favoured rituals of Heaven was right then this would be an ideal opportunity to awaken the divine power within him. However, there were several other factors that could be brought in that could change the nature of the rest of the ceremony.
Well, she doubted that a servant of the Heavens would be open to the idea of using live sacrifices to perform the awakening. That method would be . . . efficient, especially if others of divine bloodlines could be used as fodder, but its distasteful nature meant that such a choice was unlikely. An alternative was that this area was far from any other major mortal habitation, and the land was rich and fertile. Perhaps they planned to harvest lifeforce from the area rather than from a living being. While such a drain would render the land bleak and barren for years it would recover in time, so that would be a more palatable option for those constrained by morals. Still, who knew how many animals would be killed or displaced by the results? Given that the entire local ecology would be devastated, if not outright destroyed, by the use of such an option, it was probably off the table as well, so long as better options existed.
So that left other methods for amassing the power needed. Things such as invoking gods and begging for their aid were possible, but the forces of Heaven very rarely chose to approach the pantheons from anything other than a position of strength. A deal could be cut, she supposed, but on a matter such as the awakening of the demigod’s blood . . . it was unlikely. Given his potential power, bringing in others before he’d come into that power was asking for trouble.
That left either harvesting ambient power from greater sources, such as the world’s atmosphere, the sun, the moon, or the stars. Then there was using reagents or artefacts found in old temples or sacred locations to provide the initiating power for the ritual. There were a great number of items in the world, or in the vaults of Heaven, that could provide all the energy that would be needed. Artefacts also had the advantage of being more portable, meaning that there was greater freedom of location, but even so, a site of some sort would be of value.
She wasn’t entirely sure of which method was going to be used. This out-of-the-way location had clearly been prepared beforehand, indicating that they weren’t planning to move anywhere. However, this very isolation meant there were no nearby sites of significance to be had, not even old ruins buried beneath the ground.
There was just too much that she didn’t know, too much that she’d just have to deal with. It was best to focus on what she knew, what she was certain of.
Glancing up at the sun she saw that it would soon be going down. She had perhaps an hour of sunlight left, possibly even less. That was fine though, she could perform the preparations that she needed from where she was in the time that remained.
Kneeling where she stood and unshouldering her bag, she reached down and drew out a pair of metal sticks, each one a foot in length and sharpened at one end. Had anyone else been present they might have commented on the simple beauty of the slim rods. Each seemed to have a rippling pattern upon them, as the metal shifted hue from silvery steel to bright copper, to shining gold, to an odd red colour that seemed unusual for a metal. The effect was quite lovely, an image of many ores and colours forged together into something that would not have been out of place in an art gallery.
Without a moment of hesitation, she drove the spikes into the earth, the points digging deeply into the soft soil until only a finger width remained above the ground.
With the metal rods buried, she took out some packages and tore them open. One contained small bangles made from tiny bones and amber beads, which she hung about her neck outside her hoodie. Another was a powder of some black shiny substance which she scattered liberally around the area. Another held a thick resin of a dark blue colour which she used to anoint the ends of the rods that remained above the earth. Another package held some dried leaves that almost crumbled to the touch. These she buried in the ground using the heel of her old sneaker to dig a shallow hole, then push the dirt back over them. The last of the small bundles of paper revealed a vial of poisonously green liquid which she quickly swallowed before sitting down between the buried metal rods.
“Now, I just have to wait.” She muttered to herself as she watched the sun slowly descend.